Rancho Guejito’s future is one tough forecast

“Coming upon it unexpectedly is like being time-warped backward … back to the time when the kingdom-sized land grants were passing from the hands of Californio dons into the hands of American ranchers.”

That’s how a dear friend, the late Hugh Crumpler of Rancho Bernardo, framed his stolen view of Rancho Guejito more than 20 years ago in a story in The San Diego Union.

“The sea of grass lifts and falls for miles across the hills and valleys,” the old war correspondent wrote. “The grass is everywhere, like green waves on a placid sea.”

Crumpler’s dreamscape was studded by moody Engelmann oak like “motionless schooners on a becalmed sea.”

Rancho Guejito is arguably the greatest — and certainly the most exclusive — museum in San Diego County: 13,000 acres plus nearly 9,000 acres of ranch land acquired later. Near Lake Wohlford, it’s California’s only remaining undeveloped Mexican land grant out of 800 original grants, and it’s the setting for one of the region’s most compelling mystery stories.

Will large swaths of Rancho Guejito turn into Rancho Bernardo, a stuccoed cash cow where cattle once grazed?

Will the rancho become a public park swarming with bikers and backpackers, a supersized Daley Ranch?

Will it be acquired by a conservancy that preserves the cattle ranch with limited visitors?

Or could the cattle be herded off and the land, beaten down by thousands of hoofs, return to its pre-19th-century glory?

Or will the Guejito remain the reclusive cattle ranch that time forgot?

Last week, I accepted a generous invitation from Gloria Warren and Mike Geddes to drink in their expansive view of Rancho Guejito.

The couple’s wedge-shaped, 20-acre property jabs into the western midsection of the Guejito. A rusty barbed-wire fence separates them from San Diego County’s answer to the legendary Shangri-La.

From the couple’s elevated water tower, you can survey the length and breadth of the whole rancho. Every day, they spy golden eagles soaring overhead and deer, bobcats, turkeys and coyotes slipping through the arroyos. Cattle and horses periodically come to the fence to pass the time of day.

Warren and Geddes remember Benjamin Coates — the late industrialist from back East who bought the Guejito in 1974 for $10 million — riding by on horseback, looking every inch the archetypal Western rancher.

In my city view, these two are among the luckiest landowners on God’s green (this rain-soaked spring, really green) Earth.

Of course, I wouldn’t have said that in 2003 when the Cedar fire destroyed their home. I wouldn’t have said it in 2007 when the Witch Creek fire stormed within a half-mile from the new house they’d built by hand.

“It’s not for everyone,” Geddes says with a worldly smile.

For five years, Warren and Geddes have lived with the free-floating anxiety that the Rodney Co., headed by Coates’ daughter, will build tract homes in what they view as their 33-square-mile backyard.